Commercial cleaning bid calculator

How the calculator works

It runs the standard commercial cleaning bid formula, one step at a time, and shows you every intermediate number so you can check it rather than trust it.

Working left to right: gross area × cleanable percentage gives the area you actually service. That divided by the production rate gives hours per visit. Multiplied by visits per month — which is cleans per week × 52 ÷ 12 — gives monthly hours. Multiplied by the wage plus burden gives your labour cost. Supplies and overhead are added as percentages of labour, and the total is divided by one minus your margin.

One deliberate adjustment: hours per visit are rounded up to the nearest quarter hour, because you roster people in real increments rather than to two decimal places. A site that calculates at 3.19 hours is costed at 3.25. The calculator shows both so you can see what it did. If you compare it against the worked example in the pricing guide, expect the odd dollar of difference — that article rounds each line before adding, the calculator carries full precision to the end.

Choosing a production rate

This is the input that moves the price most, and the one people guess at hardest. A production rate is simply how much area one cleaner covers in an hour, blended across the fast parts of a building and the slow ones. Restrooms drag the average down hard; open carpet pulls it up.

The building types in the calculator set these starting points:

These are blended benchmarks for routine nightly cleaning, in the region of the published industry cleaning times most operators work from. They are a starting point for a building you have never cleaned. The moment you have your own timesheets, use those — your crew and your standards produce a rate no published table can know.

The two sanity checks

A formula will happily return a confident, wrong number if an input is wrong, so the calculator checks its own answer two ways.

Effective charge-out rate is the monthly price divided by monthly hours. It is the most reliable check because it does not move with frequency or building size. Commercial cleaning generally charges out somewhere around $25–$45 an hour. Well below that and something is wrong upstream — usually an over-optimistic production rate.

Price per unit area is shown for reference and compared against a frequency-adjusted band, because a site cleaned five nights a week should obviously cost more per square foot per month than one cleaned weekly. It is a weaker check than the hourly rate, which is why it is second.

What the number does not include

• Periodic work — carpet extraction, floor stripping and sealing, windows, high dusting. Quote these separately or fold them in deliberately with the frequency stated.
• Consumables — paper, soap, liners, if you supply them. These scale with occupancy, not floor area.
• Day porter or daytime cover, which is a different labour line at a different rate.
• Reactive callouts and public holiday servicing.
• Sales tax, GST or VAT — everything here is exclusive.

For the full reasoning behind each step, including the labour burden trap and why adding margin costs you a fifth of it, read how much to charge for commercial cleaning. To check the answer against its building type, there is a rate chart by frequency — and if your overhead percentage is a guess, the seven costs cleaners forget is worth ten minutes before you trust it.